Donationware is a viable business model for basically nobody.

Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to.

  > Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to.

It doesn't work because people that make $100k+ salaries wont buy their "friend" a beer. It's not failing because a bunch of poor people don't donate.

And it is viable because many things already operate this way. The most profitable ones have just convinced companies to donate. That shouldn't be required, but I'm not ignoring the reality.

Besides, this is a reality that is solvable simply by a small percentage of people going "you know what? I will donate". Not "everybody", just a very very small proportion. Let's take ripgrep as an example. Who knows how many people use this, but there's over 64k stars. Let's say 1% donate $5/mo. That's $3.2k/mo for burntsushi, I'm pretty sure he'd be happy with that. He's also a prolific HN user so maybe he'll even respond.

My point is that all it takes is a mental shift from a small number of people. This isn't some "we need huge collaboration therefore it'll never happen" type of thing, this is "I can take action and have meaningful impact today" type of thing.

And yet the majority of all computers dont just have some open source software, their operating systems are open source. The worlds digital infrastructure is largely open source.